Huddle Ups

Huddle Ups will be on the show floor for you to engage with technology and business topics in a relaxed setting. Hear experts in Additive Manufacturing, Smart, Cyber Security and other key business topics share their knowledge. These Short 20 minute interactive sessions are included with your WESTEC admission. Stop by anytime throughout the day to learn and network with the experts.

In this presentation, Bryan Sapot will reveal how many existing manufacturers collect, measure, and utilize their OEE data. He will display real world examples from live shop floors, to paint a picture of how even some of our most objective lean manufacturing data can often be manipulated or misleading. Bryan will then present several use cases of how this specifically occurs with things like quality and availability.

Hybrid Manufacturing is a metal additive manufacturing technology that is becoming mainstream. The unique combination of direct energy deposition with CNC machining poses several advantages of either independently. Together these technologies outperform any other manufacturing process involving metal 3D printing in terms of speed, surface resolution, size of parts, material flexibility, and part complexity. The technology has recently been made adaptable to nearly any CNC machine.

As defined by the ASTM F42 committee, there are seven major 3D Printing process families, of which five are currently capable of printing in metal. Each has a collection of strengths and relative weaknesses. Each is distinctly geared toward a different type of application. This presentation will provide a summary overview on each of the seven key processes, outlining pros, cons, and applications commonly served. Powder Bed Fusion, Directed Energy Deposition, Sheet Lamination, Binder Jetting, and Extrusion will all be addressed.

The ability for enterprise employees to produce a small replacement part, create a prototype, or develop a usable product via a 3D printer directly at their desk has historically been viewed as a hopeful wish, yet unattainable due to cost and physical printing restrictions. Until recently, most professional users would dismiss desktop printing due to machine and part quality. However, recent innovations and increased accessibility within the market have made the notion of desktop 3D printing a reality that’s completely changing the way many businesses work.

Traditional cleaning methods are time-consuming and can be ineffective, costly, and can cause damage to expensive tooling. This presentation provides details for attacking and reducing the costs associated with traditional cleaning applications in manufacturing industries.

Designing and launching products, whether revolutionary or evolutionary, is difficult for myriad of reasons. There’s an immense focus on sales and product marketing challenges. (TAM, customer education of a revolutionary products, competitiveness of features, an effective marketing campaign, and so on…) While these are all critical, there is often not enough attention paid to the several “other” engineering disciplines that are critical to a successful product launch. And in most cases is the reason product launches are delayed and even canceled leaving a $0 return on the R&D investment…Not to mention the evaporation of revenue and market share…

BTO and ETO manufacturers quote product(s) that are comprised of both released and “yet to be designed” parts. Traditional ERP solutions lack the ability to adequately treat unreleased parts through such process disciplines as engineering, estimating, tooling and manufacturing phases. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) is a class of software that is uniquely qualified to support these pre-release processes but has typically not been pushed to support the quoting cycle. This session shows how companies are benefiting by leveraging PLM to field quotes, treat unreleased parts, collect the needed quoting information and even develop “proforma P&L” to track the quoted profit margin.

In this session, Electric Imp Co-Founder and CEO Hugo Fiennes will take the covers off the real security threats unique to IoT. Learn how factors like device longevity, pervasive deployments, evolving cloud services and varied connectivity options each present daunting security challenges for even the most sophisticated and experienced development shops. You will leave the session with a fresh perspective why security is integral to accelerating IoT deployments.

Lean fails in many organizations not from the complexity of the tool kit but rather a failure of leadership. Specifically, lean implementation leaders do not take a hands on approach but rather delegate responsibility to lower level leaders. Lean demands that everyone from the top to the front line be engaged.

If you think your High Mix / Low Volume work is difficult to automate, think again. In this presentation we will demonstrate how using a mobile robotic loading cell can reduce cycle time & save you money. Turn any VMC or Turning Center into 24/7 unmanned operations with simple set ups & programming.

Management systems are defined as the framework of policies, processes and procedures used to ensure an organization can fulfill all tasks required to achieve its objectives. Every organization possesses a management system is some form or fashion that works (for better or worse) to manage their business. A strong management system requires interrelated elements that work together to understand how the business is functioning, make decisions, drive change and deliver results. However, management systems tend to not function if they are not properly built or maintained. There are four common areas of management system failure that we will discuss. Examples of failure, corrective action and organizational impact from several organizations will be provided. Organizations will not be named; however examples range from construction to oil & gas and functional areas include engineering and operations.

There are multiple challenges that many startups and manufacturers encounter when developing a product for the medical industry. The presentation will focus on key differences between product development and medical device development including quality systems, design best practices and roadblocks, manufacturing best practices and roadblocks, device classification, ISO13485 certification and more.

While making hardware is hard, making high-quality hardware is radically more difficult. That doesn’t stop many companies from chasing “Apple-like” quality. In a survey of engineers at over 100 companies, Apple was the most frequently mentioned as a quality leader to emulate. However, even Apple can struggle to meet its own bar: AirPods shipped months late. Discovering and fixing product quality issues is a highly manual process requiring massive capital resources and weeks or months on the factory floor, often in Asia. Product launch delays are prevalent and cost large companies millions or more in lost revenue each day. The best hardware development teams leverage new advances in smart manufacturing technology to reduce inefficiencies and prevent delays. When done right, it’s possible to stop delays before they start and roll out an exceptional product on time.

Every CAM vendor, machine tool builder, and cutting tool supplier promotes the importance of cutting optimization. But what is really meant by “optimization”? This presentation will provide an analytic overview of the different types, with special focus on which optimization techniques are best suited for different materials or machining processes. It will also introduce attendees to a new physics-based optimization method that determines the maximum reliable feed rate for a given cutting condition based on the following four factors: force on the cutter, spindle power, maximum chip thickness, and maximum allowable feed rate.

Today’s manufacturing companies are under constant pricing pressure. By using 5 axis machining strategies, your team can reduce setup time and improve throughput. As a result, the typical manufacturing firm can realize production savings of 30% The speaker will discuss the process of multi-sided machining, utilizing CAD/CAM and innovative workholding techniques.

The presentation will review common pitfalls when selecting and implementing a machine monitoring system. We will then discuss best practices to ensure a successful implementation as well as required features to ensure ongoing, long term value from the system.